December’s Member of the Month, Alan Hougum

Alan took some time to answer our questions:

What is the greatest success you’ve had since joining LWP?
Our firm’s greatest success since joining LWP has been the ability to provide full service estate planning and elder law services to clients, regardless of their facts or circumstances.  We are not limited to certain types of solutions, hoping clients with exactly those needs happen to find us.  In fact, one of the most rewarding aspects is that we’ve become a firm that receives referrals from other estate planning attorneys who aren’t equipped to handle the difficult fact patterns.

What is your favorite LWP tool?
Although each of us may have a fondness for different LWP tools, overall our favorite as a firm is the combination of the Design Template and CCS-drafting software.  Those two work in tandem to allow us to synthesize a client’s preferences and convert those preferences into something that provides lasting value.  

How has being part of LWP impacted your team and your practice?
Being a part of LWP has allowed each member of our team to take ownership of his or her part in the process.  It has been rewarding to see how much differently we operate than non-LWP estate planning firms, especially in how much emphasis LWP (and our firm) places on educating each client.  That standard applies to every member of our team now in a way which is much more meaningful than it was before we found LWP.

Share something about yourself that most people don’t know about you.
I’ve always wanted to be either a cornerback for the Green Bay Packers or a radio DJ.  Playing for the Pack didn’t work out, but I did two things to get closer to that second goal:  1) I currently host a live, local radio call-in show on estate planning about eight or ten times each year, which is a lot of fun; and, 2) for about a year during my law career I also moonlighted as a classic rock/hard rock DJ doing a weekly show on local radio under an assumed name, which was even more fun.

What is your favorite book and how did it impact your life?
It’s hard to narrow it down to only one book, but the best book I read in the last year was Misbehaving:  The Making of Behavioral Economics, by Richard Thaler.  It was a really fascinating look at how human psychology meets economics, and how our personalities and other biases affect how we make money decisions.  It didn’t hurt that the author was funny and that he won a Nobel Prize in Economics right after I bought the book.  If you like fiction better, my personal favorites might be Without Remorse by Tom Clancy or Beach Music by Pat Conroy. 

Congratulations to you on your continued success!